Based on lies and hate, Der Spiegel, CNN, and multiple awards juries defined global discourse against a particular group of people. Der Spiegel now fears its star former reporter and editor stole from a Syrian orphans fund-CBS News, CNN, Washington Examiner

The magazine said it now believes Relotius may have simply made up one of the main protagonists, whom the article described as young siblings.

Relotius described his attempts to help the children in a subsequent collection of articles, including a months-long effort to bring the children to Germany to be adopted by a family. Spiegel said this also appeared to be a lie.

In its most recent edition, the magazine said the scam was the “worst thing that can happen to an editorial team.”

“He invented grotesque lies and reported, for example, that the students at the John F. Kennedy high school drew their role models for the American dream as follows: ‘They did not draw a single picture of a woman,’ Relotius wrote. ‘One class drew Barack Obama, two drew John D. Rockefeller. Most of them drew Donald Trump.’ All of this is pure fiction. Every single bit is concocted bunk,” the magazine said.

Other fabrications included easily verifiable assertions, including that the film “American Sniper,” two years old at the time of Relotius’ reporting, was still running at the town’s theater to sold-out crowds and a description of the view from a downtown cafe, an establishment that lacks windows.

After a colleague working with Relotius on a story in the United States flagged suspicions about his reporting, Der Spiegel says it carried out an internal investigation. Relotius confessed last week that he invented entire passages for that article, and also falsified information in other stories, according to the magazine.

Relotius, who resigned Monday at the magazine’s request, said he was sick and needed help, a Der Spiegel spokesman told CNN.

CNN hasn’t been able to reach Relotius for comment.

Award-winning stories

His work had received awards from CNN, but a CNN spokesperson said, “Relotius was not associated with CNN, he never worked for the company and never had anything published on CNN platforms.”

Relotius has published stories in other leading German-language publications, including Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin,the Financial Times Deutschland, Die Weltand Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, according to Der Spiegel.

At The New Republic, Stephen Glass was considered a brilliant 25-year-old magazine writer, until he was unmasked as a serial fabricator and fired in 1998.”

“Nadine Schmidt and Jethro Mullen contributed to this report.”

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Added: “None of this is about Trump, or about whether you like him or not, or even if he’s a shady character or not. Instead, it’s about the influence the media have on how our opinions and ideas about people and events are being shaped on a daily basis….

It has nothing to do with journalism, though, or news. It’s smear and dirt, the business model of the National Enquirer. That’s how far our once truthful media have fallen.”

“None of this is about Trump, or about whether you like him or not, or even if he’s a shady character or not. Instead, it’s about the influence the media have on how our opinions and ideas about people and events are being shaped on a daily basis.

And once you acknowledge that your opinions of Trump, Putin et al, even without any proof of a connection between them, are actively being molded by the press you expect to inform you about the truth behind what goes on, you will have to acknowledge, too, that you are a captive of forces that use your gullibility to make a profit off you.

If our media need to make up things all the time about who’s guilty of what, because our justice systems are incapable of that, then we have a problem so enormous we may not be able to overcome it in our present settings.

Alternatively, if we trust our justice systems to deliver true justice, we don’t need a hundred articles a day to tell us how Trump or Putin are such terrible threats to our world. Our judges will tell us, not our journalists or media who are only in it for a profit.

I can say: “let’s start off 2019 trying to leave prejudice behind”, and as much as that is needed and you may agree with me, it’s no use if you don’t realize to what extent your views of the world have been shaped by prejudice.

I see people reacting to the star writer at Der Spiegel who wrote a lot about Trump, being exposed as a fraud. I also see people trying to defend Julian Assange from the Guardian article about his alleged meetings with Paul Manafort, that was an obvious big fat lie (the truth is Manafort talked to Ecuador to help them ‘sell’ Assange to the US).

But reacting to the very obvious stuff is not enough. The echo chamber distorts the truth about Trump every single day, and at least six times on Sunday, as this essay of mine shows. It’s just that after two years of this going on 24/7, it is perceived as the normal.

Everyone makes money dumping on the Donald, it’s a proven success formula, so why would the Guardian and Der Spiegel stay behind? They’d only hurt their own bottom line.

It has nothing to do with journalism, though, or news. It’s smear and dirt, the business model of the National Enquirer. That’s how far our once truthful media have fallen.”